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Fire has been a part of India’s landscape since time immemorial and can play a vital role in healthy forests, recycling nutrients, helping tree species regenerate, removing invasive weeds and pathogens, and maintaining habitat for some wildlife. Occasional...
更多显示Fire has been a part of India’s landscape since time immemorial and can play a vital role in healthy forests, recycling nutrients, helping tree species regenerate, removing invasive weeds and pathogens, and maintaining habitat for some wildlife. Occasional fires can also keep down fuel loads that feed larger, more destructive conflagrations, but as populations and demands on forest resources have grown, the cycle of fire has spun out of balance. Large areas of degraded forest are now subject to burning on an annual or semi-annual basis. As these fires are no longer beneficial to forest health, India is increasingly wrestling with how to improve the prevention and management of unwanted forest fires. India is not alone in facing this challenge. Forest fires have become an issue of global concern. In many other countries, wildfires are burning larger areas, and fire seasons are growing longer due to a warming climate (Jolly et al 2015). With growing populations in and around the edges of forests, more lives and property is now at risk from fire. About 670,000 km2 of forest land are burned each year on average (about 2 percent of the world’s forested areas (van Lierop et al 2015)), releasing billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere,1 while hundreds of thousands of people are believed to die due to illnesses caused by exposure to smoke from forest fires and other landscape fires (Johnston et al 2012). Tackling forest fires is even more imperative in India as the country has set ambitious policy goals for improving the sustainability of its forests. As part of the National Mission for Green India under India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change, the government has committed to increase forest and tree cover by 5 million hectares and to improve the quality of forest on another 5 million hectares. Relatedly, under its NDC, India has committed to bringing 33 percent of its geographical area under forest cover and to create additional sinks of 2.5 billion to 3 billion tons worth of CO2 stored in its forests by 2030. Yet, it is unclear whether India can achieve these goals if the prevention and management of forest fires is not improved. Field-verified data on the extent and severity of fires are lacking, and understanding of the longer-term impacts of forest fires on the health of India’s forests remains weak. The objective of this assessment is to strengthen knowledge on forest fires by documenting current management systems, identifying gaps in implementation, and making recommendations how these systems can be improved.
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